Why are we seeing transport volumes fall by a fifth when processing at Russian refineries has slumped by almost 40%? The reason is that the enemy is frantically activating schemes to import fuel from India and South Korea, and is widely using additives, alcohols and technological blending agents to dilute feedstock, trying at any cost to keep the domestic market from collapsing.
However, the situation remains extremely unpleasant for them, which is easy to verify on numerous aggregators and monitoring sites: the number of “red” petrol stations in Russia’s regions is steadily growing, and the absence of petrol at filling stations in St Petersburg or the Kuban has become routine.
In these conditions, Russia’s top military and political leadership has ordered a mirror response at any cost, because the notional “Tambovs” and “Spartaks” demand footage of destroyed Ukrainian infrastructure.
But how do you respond symmetrically when our entire fuel system is as decentralised as possible? Petrol stations turned out to be the perfect solution for them. It provides quick, vivid footage for television, creates additional economic pressure on jobs, and is an attempt to deprive Ukraine’s Defence Forces of key hubs for rest, refuelling and short stops in regions adjacent to the line of contact.
Even if an ordinary filling station is nowhere near a refinery in scale, for Russian information-psychological operations it is enough to show a burning cluster of pumps to report yet another “acts of retribution”.
More than 6,000 filling stations are currently operating in Ukraine, including both official chain sites and the grey sector. In addition, there is a significant layer of departmental and military filling points directly within units, which are not counted in civilian statistics at all, although they operate without interruption. One thing is trying to hit stations along the line of combat engagement with multiple-launch rocket artillery such as the Tornado-S, missiles from S-300 systems, or guided aerial bombs.
It is quite another to try to target the civilian retail network deep in the rear, where a significant share of their Shahed drones and cruise missiles are destroyed by our air defences or forced off course by the heavy pressure of electronic warfare systems.
The strategic logic of this Kremlin desk-bound plan is simple: they are physically incapable of knocking out all six thousand stations, because they do not have such an astronomical surplus of strike assets to work against retail. The main task of these strikes is to force owners of Ukrainian fuel networks to raise retail prices due to increased risks and higher property insurance costs, and also to try to disrupt “just-in-time” logistics in frontline areas, where civilian filling stations function as operational pit-stops for military transport, medics’ pick-ups and volunteers.
What we are seeing now — systematic strikes on filling stations, Silpo warehouses, Nova Poshta terminals and McDonald’s restaurants — is a clear marker of their strategic dead end.
The enemy has definitively shifted to a tactic of inflicting a thousand small cuts on our decentralised economy. They are unable to isolate the battlefield, they have failed to collapse the country’s macro-logistics, so they are trying to shred “just-in-time” delivery to make civilians’ lives more expensive, drive up businesses’ tariff rates, and produce media footage for their own brainwashed population.
The main points of the enemy’s effort remain Kharkiv and certain nearby districts, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, the southern logistics corridor towards Romania, and Kyiv. Massive, targeted strikes on filling-station complexes began in April 2026. As of today, around 350 Ukrainian filling stations have been hit and damaged across the country, which is roughly six per cent of the market’s total capacity. The actual ratio of completely burnt-out sites to partially damaged ones is approximately 70 to 280.
Serhii Kuiun, Director of the A-95 Consulting Group, confirms that about 80% of stations nationwide promptly resume operations after enemy strikes. There is no fuel shortage in any region of Ukraine — unlike in Russia itself, where filling stations regularly stand empty. Where the enemy manages to land a full package of missiles or S-300s, a powerful large-scale fire does indeed break out.
However, a direct hit on a recessed, reinforced-concrete tank with a capacity of dozens of cubic metres is an exceptionally rare event. This level of damage is not capable of collapsing our decentralised fuel supply system, because the first destroyed and damaged sites have already been rebuilt and brought back into operation. The main value — and at the same time the least vulnerable element of any modern filling station — the core volume of fuel is stored underground. The tanks are securely buried, have double steel walls and are encased in a thick layer of concrete. It is physically impossible to reach them with an ordinary Shahed or with fragments from a missile shot down nearby.
That is why network repair crews quickly board up shattered shopfronts with OSB panels, replace hoses on fuel dispensers shredded by shrapnel, install a new Starlink terminal — and within a week the filling station on a main trunk road is once again dispensing diesel for logistics. It is simply impossible to break infrastructure that is buried deep underground with drones.
The capital is the ideal litmus test here. According to official data from the Kyiv City Military Administration, as of mid-September 2026, 16 filling-station complexes in the capital had been damaged. This was the same peak period when the enemy was trying to systematically terrorise the city’s retail sector. One of the latest episodes was a Shahed strike on an OKKO filling station in Obolon, where the pumps were shredded, but the tanks themselves remained intact and no one was injured. In addition, there is an official statement from Ukrnafta dated 22 September: they reported directly that absolutely all of their sites in Kyiv that came under the latest drone attacks have already fully restored their core function and are operating as normal.
Read alsoUkrnafta CEO Bohdan Kukura: “All filling stations in Kyiv damaged as a result of the attacks have already resumed fuel dispensing”
For our part, we have also begun actively working over the enemy’s filling infrastructure in the border areas of the Belgorod region and in the temporarily occupied territories, having already knocked out around 60 sites. At the same time, we are conserving the bulk of our long-range salvos and mid-range strikes for far more significant targets — Russian refineries, chemical plants, defence-industry facilities and air bases. Nevertheless, we have also joined this war of attrition — because why not?
In the end, our just-in-time delivery system bends, but does not break. As of October 2026, this is exactly what the situation looks like. We are under very serious pressure, but the enemy cannot — and will no longer be able to — achieve its strategic objectives by striking the network of filling stations.